Its northern half has been gradually claimed by erosion, the ground falling away toward the river below, while the southern arc of its earthen bank still holds its shape well enough to read. What remains is roughly half a circle, a ghost of an enclosure that once measured about 32 metres across.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were the most common type of Early Medieval settlement in Ireland, typically dating from around the sixth to the tenth century. They were domestic enclosures, home to farming families who enclosed their household and livestock within a raised earthen bank and an outer ditch, called a fosse. At Glanareagh, that outer fosse still reaches about 1.5 metres deep in places, and a probable entrance on the south-eastern side, roughly 4 metres wide, retains traces of a causeway crossing it. The positioning here is striking; the fort was placed deliberately at a height, commanding a view directly north and northwest over the Mealagh valley, the kind of location that would have given its inhabitants a clear outlook across the surrounding landscape. At some point after the fort fell out of use, deciduous trees were planted within the interior, and by the time the site was visited by Myler in 1998, young oak trees had taken root inside the old enclosure walls. That detail has a certain fittingness to it, given the oak's long association in Irish tradition with boundaries, sacred space, and the memory of place. Myler also recorded that the site carries folk stories and local tales, though the specifics of those remain unrecorded in surviving documentation.